[watsonc73]

Happy Friday!

I'm the co-founder of Retro Patents and we're super proud to bring the site to the HN community.

Last year, we were travelling in Europe and we came across a boutique print shop that had a Harley Davidson motorcycle patent in the window. We really liked the minimalist look to it and remembered how we'd used early product prototypes for motivation in the past. There's nothing more inspiring than seeing a world beating product stripped down to its core.

So we started the website you see today to help inspire others to go out and create magic. The prints also look really good as wall art ;)

There's a 15% discount for the HN community if you use the code (HACKER).

P.s. Max Levchin (PayPal founder) bought his own print and shared it on Twitter earlier this week - it was a great moment !

[PatentTroll]

Why not the "classics" like the Edsison light bulb or the Wright flyer patent? I consider the old ones to be beautiful

[jaclaz]

+1, the idea in itself is nice, maybe - ideally - you could make some sort of "public" submission form ending up in a list , and then make into production the most voted/asked for, and - say - send a free print to the person submitting the most voted one weekly or monthly.

BTW, and as a side note, not all Patent images are reproducible free of charge, so the above list might need to have an additional field for it being public domain or otherwise, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_US_patent...

Another thing, I concur with the people that see the large print of the whatever commercial name as being a spoiler of some sort, the original title might be better, as an example the "Gameboy" patent title is(was):

http://www.google.com/patents/US5184830

"Compact hand-held video game system" and the iPhone is "Electronic device": https://www.google.com/patents/USD615083S1 which sound (at least to me) a lot better.

Just as an idea, you could then have the "Gameboy" printed on the back and an extract of the patent text, like the "Field of Invention" or however the summary.

Just for your information, there is something wrong in the iPhone one, is it May 4,2010 or June 5, 2008? (i.e. publishing date vs. filing date) And the patent number is either USD615083 S1 or US D615083 S1, not just S.

[watsonc73]

We're also fans of some of the classic inventions but we have a preference for modern products that still inspire.

They're more relatable and it's cool when the actual patent authors are still alive as it makes the product's growth all the more impressive.